Note that although the log dumper (logcat) is described on the Android developer site on the 'adb' page,
there is a native logcat command included in the Android distribution (that is, available on the target
file system, which can be run locally).

tracers

strace

You can use strace on Android. It is included in the
Android open source project (at least as of Android 2.1), and appears to be automatically
installed in engineering builds of the software.

To use strace during early initialization, you can put it in the /init.rc file.
For example, to trace zygote initialization, change the following line in
/init.rc.